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BI, EPM and EDW trends to watch out for in 2010
Madan Sheina, Helena Schwenk
BI, EPM and EDW trends to watch out for in 2010
While other enterprise applications software markets flounder, the business intelligence (BI), enterprise performance management (EPM) and enterprise data warehousing (EDW) sectors continue to flourish and top CIO spending agendas. Ovum's in-house BI, EPM and EDW experts give their predictions on how each of these technologies will evolve in 2010.BI - providing insight and actionable information through analytics
The market for BI in 2010 will be shaped by the need for businesses to regain momentum and competitive edge as the economy picks up and recovers from the recession. Organisations looking for accessible and easily digestible information will place an added emphasis on improved user interfaces and self-service, better visualisation and superior collaboration capabilities. In addition, senior managers will look for analytics they can trust and so will want capabilities that enable the business to check and validate the results. Furthermore, the desire to minimise strategic and operational risks, particularly in these early stages of a shaky recovery, will drive demand for automated analytics based on stringent business rules and industry-specific analytic applications. Data quality is an imperative for improved insight. We therefore expect 2010 to be the year that senior management finally recognises its importance, and so data quality, the Cinderella of technologies, could come in from the cold and join the software priorities ball. New technology investment is unlikely to return to the heady heights of the mid-noughties boom, so many organisations will focus on consolidating existing BI deployments to realise better returns. For the mid-market and those new to BI, open source and BI software as a service (SaaS) will offer attractive alternatives. In the case of BI SaaS, increasing deployments of enterprise applications in the cloud by SMEs will act as a further driver for take-up of this option. EPM - back to basics and unification with GRC
Two major trends will drive interest and take-up of EPM solutions in 2010. The first is a renewed focus on CFOs to 'get back to basics' and improve financial performance management. The second is the increasing convergence of EPM with governance risk and compliance (GRC).In a tight economy, closer scrutiny of financial and operating results by external stakeholders is compelling CFOs to improve the gathering, analysis and reporting of financial information. The need to prevent any 'nasty surprises', improve financial process efficiencies, optimise cash flow and close the books faster will see more companies adopting a more formalised EPM process for planning, budgeting, forecasting, consolidation and reporting in 2010.The emphasis on compliance, risk management and stringent financial regulations will expand the functional scope of traditional EPM to deliver risk-adjusted business strategy planning. Regulatory compliance will continue to drive EPM, but it will be eclipsed by risk mitigation in 2010 as companies look to execute operationally on strategies that help them to survive the economic downturn. Risk management will become the focal point for integration efforts between EPM and GRC systems as a unified process-based framework that allows for effective governance. EDW - getting bigger and faster at the same time
A rising tide of data, shrinking windows of analysis and tightening IT budgets mean that EDWs will need to get bigger, more agile, and quicker and cheaper to deploy next year. Don't be surprised to see petabyte-scale EDWs emerge as the norm in certain web-centric businesses. EDWs will also become more agile as companies increasingly use them to support daily operational decision-making. That means overhauling traditional batch-driven ETL processes with realtime latency.Getting bigger and faster doesn't necessarily mean bulking up on more expensive and complex-to-manage hardware infrastructure. Alternative data management models such as MapReduce will start to prove themselves in analytic environments in handling incredible data volumes. New DBMS innovations around in-memory processing, exploiting parallelism and columnar storage options will open up analytics against massive data volumes to a broader audience at a hitherto unimaginable low price point.Meanwhile, cloud computing and SaaS-based data integration solutions will offer opportunities to further push down infrastructure capex costs by passing on the burden to hosted providers. Expect more companies to use the cloud as a risk-free way to prototype and engage in analytical data warehousing and datamarts, but only for BI applications where it makes sense to. Don't expect EDWs to be pushed into the cloud in their entirety as yet. Finally, acceptance of pre-packaged hardware-software appliances will take away the pain and expense of assembling and calibrating all of the component pieces. However, companies should carefully consider the proprietary nature of these solutions, at both the front and back ends.
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This article is an extract taken from Ovum's Straight Talk service. This daily email bulletin provides our expert's views and opinions on important news and events in global IT and telecoms. If you have a comment or question regarding this article then please submit your details here:
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